To the Supreme Council of India, though he was one of their number, the author never makes any but disparaging allusions. Discontented with being a commander-in-chief under a ruling body, of which he was himself a member, he sought to be recognised as the head of a separate military government. He wished, in short, to be, not what the Duke of York was in England, but what, under peculiar circumstances, the Duke of Wellington was in Spain during the war in the Peninsula. In this he was not singular; for we suspect that the real cause of that uneasiness in their position, stated at page 355, to have been manifested by many of Sir C. Napier’s predecessors, is to be found in a desire on their part for such an independency of military administrative power, as is totally incompatible with the necessary unity and indivisibility of a government. Yet it is admitted that, in England, “when war comes, the war-minister is the real commander,”—(p. 220.) The author evidently felt how much this admission must tell against his own complaints of undue interference with his authority; for he endeavours, by some feeble special pleading, to abate its effect, and to prove the “poor Indian general,” with his £15,000 a year, to be more unfavourably placed than his _confrère_ in England. One circumstance, however, is such, that while the latter is excluded from the Cabinet, the former can take his seat at the Council-Board, and his part in the guidance of the counsels of the State. It is, we think, greatly to be regretted that Sir C. Napier did not more frequently avail himself of this privilege, for by keeping apart from the Supreme Council he lost the benefit of free personal communication with equals, and incurred the evil of having none near him but subordinates, whom he could silence by a word or a look. The Civil Service is represented simply as a nuisance requiring immediate abatement. We are told that “a Civil form of government is uncongenial to _barbarous_ Eastern nations.” There is some truth in this, if a proper stress is laid on the word _barbarous_. In the first chapter of the fourth part of his work, Mr Kaye has shown how, in reaching the outskirts of civilisation, we are brought into contact with rude tribes like the Beloches in Scinde, “to whose feelings and habits the rough ways of Sir C. Napier were better adapted than the refined tenderness or the judicial niceties of the gentlest and wisest statesman that ever loved and toiled for a people.” But the error of such reasoners as Sir C. Napier is, that they would treat all India as barbarous, and rule it accordingly. Now, with all our respect for Sir C. Napier’s talents, we doubt much whether he would have governed the more civilised provinces of Upper India better than the late Mr Thomason, whom he condescends to praise—(p. 37); or managed the subtle and well-mannered Sikhs with more tact and skill than Sir George Clerk during the perilous period of our disasters in 1841–42.